Post Tagged with: Freedom

Today was a monumental victory for all Americans, even those who believed (and continue to believe) that marriage equality somehow erodes the sanctity of that union. The fact is, extending the right to marry to all couples nationwide is a vindication of that union. And our Union today is stronger for it.

From Justice Kennedy, what will surely become some of the most enduring words in the history of the Supreme Court:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

I haven’t posted in a long time because I’ve been busy. Busy with work, busy with life. Being busy sometimes tricks you into believing there are no bigger causes to care about than your own petty concerns. This is one of them. As someone who has advocated for marriageequality for a very long time, I am very proud to be an American today.

To my gay friends, family, and neighbors: congratulations. This is your day. But this is also a day for America. Today was one of those rare days in American history that we will look back upon and say: “that day, we all became more free.”

We have all heard the phrase “corporations are people,” either stated in earnest as a reading of the law (corporations are people in that they are independent entities, pay taxes, have rights to due process, and of course, the right to free speech) or stated ironically as ammunition for our friends on the Left. But whereas that question is about the legal personhood of the corporate entity itself, I would like to discuss something else entirely: the oft-forgotten fact that a corporation is not a distinct entity but a team effort comprised of many individuals. In other words, “corporations are people,” and we would serve ourselves to understand this vital distinction.

So what is a corporation?

In a free society, corporations are voluntarily organized by and among a collective of individuals–investors, employees, volunteers, and customers–in order to pursue a common goal. If you look into any large corporation, you find nothing less than tens of thousands of real people, all on a team together. The goals of that team can be very different. At BP, the goal of the team is to explore, dig and extract new oil wells on the one hand and ship, refine, and distribute gasoline on the other. At Walmart, the goal of the team is to produce and purchase a variety of items so they can be sold at mass market prices in their retail stores. To take the opposite end of the corporate spectrum, the goal of the team at a hair salon is to make women beautiful.

In other words, corporations have no sentience on their own. This may seem blindingly obvious to anyone who has worked for a corporation of any size. Corporations are, first and foremost, collectives where people collaborate to perform labor in exchange for money, which is exactly what people as individuals do. Except in a corporations, people can be often more productive working as a team than they can alone. If someone takes a job with corporation instead of producing and selling a product all by themselves, it is often because they can earn more with their skills as part of a team than they can alone. And the more successful the team is at producing and selling a product, the larger, more specialized and more efficient the team becomes.

I am not suggesting that all the people who make up a corporation are equal, but merely that their incentives are aligned. Shareholders, for instance, have a much bigger stake in the corporation’s successes and failures than employees. But those employees benefit from greater corporate profits in the form of greater job security if not increased benefits and wages, and when corporations lose money, they are the first to suffer. The level of commitment and risk may vary among members of a corporate team, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less of a team, for the same reason that a quarterback and a wide receiver have very different risks and rewards that come together for a common purpose.

And yet, everywhere you turn in politics today, there is an attempt to demonize and dehumanize corporations, to “make them pay” for whatever real or imagined harm they have inflicted, and in general, hold them responsible for the world’s ills. This trend is especially alarming in Europe, where hating on corporations is in vogue, and just yesterday Angela Merkel announced a G20 conference to tackle “corporate tax avoidance,” a particularly bad euphemism since it ascribes evil intent to a perfectly legal practice, encouraged by many G20 nations themselves. Corporations are routinely maligned as rapers of the environment, destroyers of wealth, vanguards of global destruction, and, of course, kingmakers behind elections. The American Left is particularly adept at these forms of accusations, although the right takes its toll in its own crusade against nonprofits like Planned Parenthood. And the Right is more prone to defending corporations, while corporations themselves deserve neither to be attacked or defended while sparing the individuals who make them up.

Why is it so easy to detatch corporations from the people who make them up?

I think for your run-of-the-mill politician on either the Right or the Left, it is politically popular to complain that “corporations are making record profits,” whereas it would be unpalatable for a politician to complain that individual tax-paying men and women are making too much money (not to mention complaining about the jobs that follow). When a politician says that an auto company should get a bailout, that is more persuasive than suggesting that tens of thousands of employees instead receive a welfare check directly from the government. It helps to be able to hold up certain corporations as “criminal,” but corporation can’t really commit a crime, only people can. Nothing is stopping us from going after criminal individuals who make up a corporation, and we should go after them just as we do anyone else committing a crime. Yet it is far easier for politicians to attack corporations as criminal rather than individuals.

So why do we continue to dehumanize corporations?

I think one of the biggest things to drive a wedge between people and corporations has been the corporate tax. Corporate taxes aren’t really corporate taxes at all, but are in reality taxes on the people that make up that corporation. If a corporation pays money in taxes, it must take that money from the corporation. If that money comes out of the pocket of shareholders, it is a tax on shareholders. If employees must earn less to cover the cost of the tax, then it is a tax on employees. If prices must go up to compensate for the tax, then it is a tax on consumers. The corporation as an entity has not paid anything, as it does not have any money of its own (much like the government doesn’t have any money of its own). Instead, the people who make up that corporation–the shareholder, the employee, and the consumer–have paid for it.

As it happens, we already impose these taxes separately: we tax shareholders for their holdings, tax employees for their income, and tax consumers for their spending. If we were to eliminate the corporate tax entirely, surely these taxes could be appropriated to the individuals from whose pockets the money came out of in the first place. But by taxing the corporate entity, we allow shareholders, employees and consumers alike to pretend that the corporation is an entity separate and apart from themselves. At the very least, the corporate taxes imposed offset the direct cost on the individual in the short term and lets the individual believe his money is safer than it would be without the corporate tax. This is an illusion, but a compelling one: we have let it drive us to raise taxes on corporations to the highest level of any country in the industrially advanced world.

Finally, I think one more major factor in creating a dehumanizing membrane around corporations is caused by corporations themselves: branding. Branding is, definitionally, creating a unified identity and persona behind a corporation. Through branding, corporations, subvert individual identity to the wisdom of the collective. Although corporations are collections of free people, the big ones present like unifaceted behemoths; ironically, the more people a corporation contains, the less human it appears. As consumers, we allow the branding of corporations to define our attitudes towards the work those corporations do, especially if we don’t approve of it. It is easier to rally against a logo that stands for a purpose rather than lash out at the indivdual actors, for the same reason it is easier to fire on an advancing enemy under one flag than it is to hunt urban guerillas. The corporation has proudly and intentionally presented its mission for all to see, and this makes its existence even the more offensive if their mission is distasteful. The fact that profit is the primary goal of the corporation is added salt in the wound. Never mind that profit, like taxes, doesn’t belong to the corporation at all, but belongs to the shareholders, employees and consumers of the corporation.

Let’s end anti-corporatism

Now, I think that it is generally true that people will ascribe a set with the actions and morals of a much smaller subset. It is generally true for racists who use the actions of a small minority of people to justify hatred of an entire group. It is true for misogynists who prefer to paint all women with the brush of a few bad ex girlfriends. And it is true for anti-corporatists, who feed on news like an oil spill or financial system collapse as evidence of the global evil of corporations. It would of course behoove the anti-corporatists to know that their prejudice towards corporations is usually based on the behavior of a small minority of corporations, usually in one or two industries. If pressed, they will of course not attack with the same vigor barber shops, restaurants, bodegas, hardware stores, bars, nightclubs, Hollywood movies, publishing houses, newspapers, coastal fishermen, travel agencies or farmers’ markets, which are all organized as corporations. Nor will they attack corporations established for an eleemosynary purpose: Churches, preschools, health clinics, hospitals, cancer research institutes, civil liberties organizations, or rotary clubs.

In addition, the anti-corporatist slant willfully ignores the unrelenting progress and prosperity we have experienced as a society using the corporation as a vehicle. It is not a coincidence that the formation of the first corporations in 17th century Holland (debatably the first, but certainly the first legally defined joint stock operations) coincide with the explosion in private capital investment, exploration, mass employment through international trade, and real distribution of wealth through wages that characterized the late mercantilist period, sowing the seeds (or tulip bulbs) for the industrial revolution. The reasons for this are complicated, but in short: the corporate vehicle allows private investors to protect their personal assets and take risks, while at the same time providing a legal structure for many people to work together in pursuance of common goals.

I’m not suggesting that corporations are victims, but just that our rampant anti-corporatism too easily misses the vital distinction between the corporation as a legal entity and the corporation as a living organism with real human beings as its working cells. We do not benefit when we deprive corporations of oxygen. We only benefit when the corporation is allowed to thrive as an organization of free people assembled to accomplish a common purpose.

I saw Les Misérables tonight, and aside from it being an absolutely fantastic rendering of one of my favorite musicals, it got me to thinking about the role that revolution–particularly violent revolution–plays in our romantic and historical imagination.

The main theme of Les Miz, for the uninitiated, is redemption, but the story also focuses on the June 1832 Paris uprising, which was a failed one-night rebellion by students against the restored monarchy of Louis-Philippe, a rebellion to which Victor Hugo was clearly sympathetic in his original treatment. The musical has a rousing anthem for the rebellion, “Do You Hear the People Sing,” which makes up the finale, and consequently is being hummed by every audience member leaving the theater. In this anthem, we see the poor and downtrodden people of Paris fomenting revolution, joining forces against the powerful and entrenched elites as they suffer in the street. It is a powerful moment in the film which has the audience on its feet cheering on the people against their oppressors, yet it ends in tragedy as the young students all end up killed at their barricades as the people they hoped to join their movement shutter their windows. The cause of the rebels and what they died for is all but forgotten to history, and would be only a footnote if Victor Hugo hadn’t enshrined it in his book. And we are left thinking about the almost pathetic nature of the failed rebellion; that final moment when the students realized that their brief moment of agitation has resulted in only their own demise.

It got me thinking: is a violent revolution ever worth it?

If you are planning a violent revolution or overthrow of your government, you can likely expect two outcomes. Success, in which case you and your cronies have accomplished not only a political transition but you now have the opportunity to establish your new world order. Presumably, as leader of the revolution you will have some role in the new government as well. If your revolution fails, however, before 1950 you will likely be killed no questions asked; today you will at least end up in prison for the rest of your life.

In the case of failure, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the revolution, for obvious reasons. No matter how just a cause is, when you’re dead or in prison there’s not much you can do about it. In the heat of passion it is easy to rush to arms to defend a principle, but not so easy to think it was all worth it if, at the end of the day, nobody will remember you or your little uprising. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would like to be martyrs for a cause, but all I can do is feel sorry for them. On the one hand, there is bravery in standing up for your principles in the face of oppression; on the other hand, there is foolhardiness in fighting to overthrow a bigger and stronger enemy. Even if you are right, you’ll be dead, and no one will know. The ink of history is the blood of dead revolutionaries. Most of their causes were undoubtedly just. It didn’t matter in the end.

So failure doesn’t interest me. What I want to know is, in the case of successful revolution, is it worth it–and I mean is it worth it morally, as either a participant or a sympathiser? In other words, has any good ever come of violent revolution, and would we expect any good to come out of a future one? (Although “good” is a relativistic term, let us say that generally “good” means improvement in the general wellbeing of society on the whole, and not just the party of the revolution.)

My short answer based on a cursory reading of history is that no, violent revolution has almost never had positive results. The most successful violent revolutions were either unmitigated disasters in their political and economic consequences (the Bolsheviks, the Fascists in Italy), completely unsuccessful in terms of their stated goals (French Revolution) or ended up installing and entrenching more oppressive regimes than the ones they supplanted (Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Algeria, Uganda). On the other hand, the most successful revolutions have largely been peaceful. Take the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transition out of the USSR, which took place with no bloodshed or violent revolution. Upon the independence of India, although partition was a nightmare, the removal of the original British colonizers was peaceful. Egypt in 2011, despite the tensions today, was largely been a peaceful transition. In South Africa, we have an interesting case of a former failed violent revolutionary, Nelson Mandela, coming back to lead a peaceful transition 30 years later. It’s a fortunate thing, too; in an earlier age, Mandela would have been sentenced to death for treason at Rivonia. Instead, he was given a life sentence with his co-conspirators.

Looking at the historical record of revolutions, it strikes me that there are a couple examples of violent revolutions that have actually worked. The first is the American case, where colonists fed up with taxes took up arms and over the course of a couple years were able to claim their own country. Another case is Libya 2011, which successfully overthrew Gaddafi and is now organizing self rule quite successfully. It’s a little too soon in Libya, but hopefully it will work out. Those are two examples–I’m sure there are some others.

But the overwhelming weight of history seems to be against violent revolution as a solution to political problems, even when it is successful. In the cases where revolutions have been successful, they have either been regime changes where there was enough popular pressure to dismantle the status quo without much violence, or they have been violent overthrows resulting in a drastically reduced quality of life for the greater society, and often a society very much different than the one intended by the revolutionaries.

I have some ideas for theories that may account for this. The first is that a political situation in which violence is necessary is one where there are entrenched interests in the status quo. These are interests that are willing and eager to defend violence against the regime with violence in turn. These interests would be supported by a large silent majority that funds or benefits from the status quo. This means that, if successful, the revolutionaries may merely be superficially victorious and all their real work lies ahead of them: work that includes the subversion of pre-revolutionary ideas and people. Any successful revolution would naturally succumb to the temptation to quash dissent and prevent counter-uprisings. The reason why a Libya revolution would be successful in the long run while a Soviet revolution would not be is there were only a handful of people supporting the Gaddafi regime, whereas many more people would have supported Tsarist or proto-capitalist Russia in opposition to a Marxist takeover. The key, I think, is in the tipping point where people are willing to openly oppose their government vs. the silent support of people to the status quo. Once a revolution is successful, it becomes the status quo and it must make a business of suppressing supporters of the old regime. In Libya, it’s not so much of a problem, but in Russia, millions of people had to die for the revolution to “succeed” in the long term.

Another theory is that political situations which devolve into violence are usually in spheres where dialog and compromise is made impossible, either by intransigent factions, warring ethnic groups, tenuous confederations, or terrorism. In these situations, violent revolution may be possible, but in doing so, the power vacuum is opened up for lots of players to take a role in shaping the new political order. The French Revolution comes to mind here. This situation, however, makes it nearly impossible to improve the general welfare, as no political stability can be had when there are many factions jockeying for power. War does not breed economic success.

Finally, successful violent revolutions simply make it too easy to install dictators and military chiefs that are unwilling to give up power. Countless dictatorial regimes started as violent revolutions: Pinochet’s Chile, Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Soviet Russia, Maoist China. It’s much harder in history to find dictators who came to power through peaceful means: Hitler and Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti come to mind of course.

So going back to the proud and foolish last stand of the ABC Club in Les Miz, I find it interesting that the weight of popular imagination in literature is usually in favor of the idealist revolutionaries who want to overthrow the system. We root for the underdog. We think a just cause justifies martyrdom in case of failure and don’t necessarily think about the downside of success. In any event, the best revolutionaries are not necessarily the best governors.

One caveat: I wouldn’t say that, just because violent revolutions haven’t worked, that they haven’t been necessary or desirable. It may be true that the Soviet Union eventually collapsed rather silently, but only after 75 brutal years of oppression during which violent revolution, like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was the only hope people had to break out of the system. Thinking about how to overthrow a truly oppressive regime that will fight back with violence, despite having relatively little support, like North Korea today, it is hard to imagine any solution other than violence, and it is easy to justify these solutions morally. However, it is also not hard to imagine that when North Korea eventually does fall, it will happen because of the economic collapse of the system and/or a domino collapse from external invasion.

So maybe my thesis should be contoured around the notion of violent revolution in a relatively stable and open society, where dialogue is permitted, economic growth exists, and there exist basic democratic institutions. In the United States, we have factions on both sides of the spectrum calling for some sort of violent revolution: the rhetoric of the Marxist left which often invokes the language of oppression to propose violent overthrow of capitalism, and the radical right which has proposed violent overthrow of the United States based on the principle of individual sovereignty. The latter group may be more worrisome because they are heavily armed, although the former group has more the weight of history behind their “noble” cause and is more prone to sympathy.

But for those of you out there who look to foment revolution as a radical solution to the problems we have as a country, remember this: the thrust of history is almost always against the short- or long-term success of violent revolution, regardless of the nobleness of the cause.

PS. Someone encourage me to examine this thesis further in the form of an actual, organized essay on the subject.

I was at the first same-sex civil union performed in Connecticut, and for that I consider myself privileged. After the brides slowly walked down the aisle to the altar, the Unitarian pastor performing the ceremony told us, through tears, that they symbolically took their time getting to the altar because it has taken them a long, long time to be able to get married. For a couple that had been together for more than 20 years, and had each spent a lifetime fighting for their right to get married, it was about bloody time they were allowed to openly, proudly declare their love for one another and have that love recognized by the state.

That was in 2005. It would still be three more years before Connecticut became only the third state to enact same-sex marriage legislation. Other states followed suit, but not without problems. In 2008, California’s infamous Prop 8 banned same-sex marriage in my current home state, rolling back a right that had been granted to gay couples previously, and prompting a litany of suits that have now reached the Supreme Court. But even in 2005, although it was still an uphill battle for millions of gay couples in the United States, it wasn’t unthinkable that the nation was at a tipping point. In just seven years’ time, a blink of the eye in legislative terms, nine states now allow same-sex couples to marry, with the first to allow it by popular vote in the last election. The president of the United States, for the first time, publicly acknowledged his support of the issue. Multiple Republicans and GOP insiders have acknowledged that there is little they can do about the eventual legalization of same sex marriage nationally. And in a stunning symbolic blow to the sadomasochistic social conservative movement, conservative-turned-libertarian Glen Beck is joining Bill O’Reilly and the ranks of the right who finally acknowledge that small-government conservatism means the government should stay out of love as well.

Pictures of couples marking their 40 years of commitment to each other with wedding rings say more about the necessity of righting this fundamental injustice nationally than I ever could, but it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on how we got here, and just how important this is to the nation. There are people today who still remember when “miscegenation” was illegal, and when blacks couldn’t marry whites. Hell, there are people today who were around when women first got the right to vote. It is a painful legacy of our history that only until recently have all people, of all kinds, truly been a part of the national project. And nothing is more odious than the interjection of government power into private lives of citizens (if you ask me, we’re going in the wrong direction: we should be ending government involvement in marriage altogether). But especially when sex and love have been used by countless regimes in history to drive wedges between people of different races and faiths (especially where religion is concerned), it has finally become somewhat of a banality at this point to stand up and declare openly, “I can love who I want and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

I could say a lot about this, particularly about South Africa which went from apartheid’s strict regulations on sex and marriage to full-blown marriage equality within 20 years, but it is amazing how steadfastly civil liberties can be protected as long as people keep speaking out for them. For there are plenty of people who would like this “sin” to be punishable by death. There are plenty of people who would like to see gays “cured” by the state, or see religion in general imposed upon children in classrooms. And, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of our friends on the left who would like to tell people what foods they can eat, or what lightbulbs they can use, or what is appropriate to say and in which fora. There will always be people who believe they have a right not to be offended by someone else’s personal choices and beliefs, and they will work to take away our rights in turn.

The test of the immutability of the right to marriage is not whether it becomes national law in 5 years, but whether in 30 years, or 50 years, people take it for granted, the way I fear many people today take their right to a fair trial for granted. Whether people realize how difficult it was to acquire these rights, there are always sinister forces looking to defeat them. We must be vigilant and continue to fight to protect our natural rights, rights that should and will belong to us even if our universe has been clouded with totalitarianism.

The wedding bells today in Washington are a welcome sound to all who can hear them. And may they soon ring out in Mississippi and Georgia and Idaho. And may they soon ring out in Indonesia and Iran and Uganda. And when they do, let us not forget how hard it is to gain our rights, and never fail to protect them.

As an aside: if you are a supporter of gay rights, but also believe in conservative ideals like small government, free minds and free markets, I recommend donating to GOProud, an conservative gay rights organization that supports states’ rights (that wonderful feature of federalism that has allowed gay couples to get married all across America even while many people oppose it). Whereas they are a little controversial on their narrow line on same-sex marriage, they get points for fighting discrimination and pushing for more acceptance in the conservative movement.

Barack Obama won. I won’t be enthusiastic, but I won’t be hateful, either. He was a better candidate with a better argument. The voters chose. Mitt Romney was an awful alternative. And, truth be told, I didn’t vote for either one. Quite clearly, my cynicism has evolved greatly since 2008.

Where do we go from here? There will be more elections, and more bitter contests. Although most people claim to belong to one party or another, I believe that all people have a soft spot for that one thing that matters more than anything else: our freedom. So here’s what I’m looking for in any candidate I support for any election in the future, regardless of party. I’m looking for candidates who support:

Freedom to choose whom I marry

Freedom to choose whom I work for and in what profession

Freedom to invest and save my wages as I please

Freedom for parents to choose schools for their children

Freedom for parents to pass their money onto their children

Freedom to make decisions about my health, both positive and negative

Freedom to vote without preconditions

Freedom to trade with foreign companies without penalty

Freedom to sell my labor for as much or as little as I am able

Freedom to sell any product or service I can provide for which there is a willing buyer

Freedom to believe in any god or no god at all

With this very simple metric, I will be able to tell which candidates deserve my vote in the future, and which candidates don’t. I don’t care about identity or politics, I only care about the odds for liberty.

Right now, the odds look a little better, with sweeping changes in four states in favor of gay marriage, and two states overturning marijuana prohibition. On the other hand, the bailouts of Wall Street and the auto industry just got a rousing endorsement. It will be hard to predict the next four years, but one thing you can count on after this generation demonstrated where it stands on social issues: the freedoms above are not unattainable. They just will require some work.

Note: I sent this email today in response to the news that the City of Chicago’s “consumer protection” bureau is about to shut down the Uber black car service in Chicago. I hope someone in Chicago reads it!

Dear Mayor Emanuel, Rosemary Krimbel, Michelle Smith and the City of Chicago,

I was disheartened to hear that the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection is seriously considering an addition to its regulations, the No Measured Rates Provision (PPV Sec. 1.10), that will restrict the use of certain technologies in reserving black cars in Chicago. It is no secret that these new subsections are an attempt to curtail the productive activities of one service in particular, Uber, which has been running a premium black car reservation service in several US cities since 2011. Uber has unequivocally stated that if these regulations go into effect, they will be forced to shut down their black car service in Chicago.

As an Uber customer and a 5-year former resident of Chicago, Ward 43, I am appalled at the actions taken by the BACP in what is a transparent (and thus far, almost successful) attempt to cut out competition and reduce consumer choice in Chicago, backed by the established taxi industry against innovators like Uber. These new regulations are nothing less than an attack on the consumer and the economy.

The origin of these new rules is supposedly the department of “Consumer Protection,” but it is unclear which consumers these regulations are supposed to protect. Customers of Uber are certainly aware of the service they are buying when they download the Uber app, enter their credit card information, and order a car. It is hard to imagine that the customers use this service willingly and pay for it–and tell their friends about it–if they didn’t derive some benefit from it. Why would thousands of customers have flocked to Uber if it wasn’t a better choice? And if it’s a worse choice, what’s the harm in letting Uber compete for customers like every other company? Even if some customers have been ripped off (which I doubt given Uber’s excellent customer service) it is wholly unfair to deprive thousands of happy customers of their choices because a vocal few are dissatisfied. By that logic, every company in Chicago with a few unsatisfied customers could face censure and delicensing.

If you don’t care about the consumer, what about the worker? Over 1,000 drivers in Chicago depend on Uber for income. These new regulations would put these drivers out of work in an already depressed economy. Uber provides an alternative employment option for drivers to make money from their assets and skills, and put cars to use that would otherwise go undriven. Drivers for Uber stand to lose the most from your unilateral action–hard working people who provide these services and make a living off of them. I have spoken to Uber drivers, and drivers for comparable services like Lyft and Sidecar, who are happy and vocal about their ability to choose among many options for earning a living. Shutting down Uber takes away employment options for good service providers, and indirectly creates a monopsony among existing employers which can be used to exploit drivers and drive down wages and working conditions.

If you have no interest in the consumer or the worker, what about the investor? Uber has raised $49.5 million in venture funding since launching in January 2011. Investors saw the long term potential of a service like Uber to provide a service, create jobs, grow the economy and return dividends. If your new rules go into effect, and other cities follow suit (as many of them already have), the willingness of future investors to take a risk on innovation, especially in a badly under-innovated space like transportation, would be affected. In addition, entrepreneurs like Garret Camp and Travis Kalanick are vital to economic growth and improving the quality of life for everyone else. Would they have taken the leap to start Uber if they had known how hostile markets like Chicago would be to their innovation? Where would our economy be without investors and entrepreneurs like the good people at Uber?

Of course, the dirty secret is that these regulations have nothing to do with consumer protection, and everything to do with legally strong-arming out competition. It is not a coincidence that a coalition of industry Yellow Group, Yellow Cab Affiliation, Taxi Affiliation Services, YC1, 5 Star Flash, Chicago Medallion One and Your Private Limousine all filed suit against Uber on October 5 in an attempt to shut down Uber. It’s one thing to let a lawsuit work its way through the courts in a judicial review; it’s quite another thing to create an end run around any dissent by changing the regulations unilaterally. It seems wholly capricious that one swipe of a pen can threaten the livelihood of thousands of people, put millions of dollars of venture funding at risk, and take away the transportation options of countless happy customers.

But, given that you have that power, why not use it wisely? Instead of stifling innovation, let the market open and let consumer choice drive the economy. Put the consumer in the front seat, where companies like Uber have to be accountable to the people that matter most: their customers.

I hope you will do the right thing and revoke these proposed rules before it’s too late.

I just read an interesting perspective from Zack Beauchamp about the interplay between economic freedom and discrimination. He was responding to this piece by John Tomasi, which in turn is based on a book that Tomasi wrote, so I’m about four degrees removed from the source already, but I wanted to respond specifically to Beauchamp’s point.

Beauchamp observes that Jews enjoyed a greater degree of social freedom when they acquired economic empowerment in the middle ages, and clearly any amount of freedom for any people would be preferable to none. But given the rise of Jewish freedom in the middle ages due to newfound economic liberty, Beauchamp then goes on to say that “We cannot be blind to the way that other forms of discrimination and power imbalances can undermine those freedoms. Sometimes, dealing with these problems requires the active exercise of state power to protect minority rights, possibly by restricting on the freedom of private actors (including economic actors) to discriminate.”

I think this is an unfounded leap to make, especially in light of the evidence he presents. Certainly, the pogroms and expulsions of Jews throughout the middle ages were a result of “the active exercise of state power,” not in spite of it, were they not? In fact, in the history of antisemitism, perhaps no force has been more destructive than state power, whether it be at the hands of Edward I, Ferdinand and Isabella, Stalin, or–forgive me Godwin–Hitler. In fact, even Beauchamp makes the point that the growth of Jewish economic freedom provided the pretext that “private and public” antisemitism needed. So although Jews were able to acquire greater freedom in spite of discrimination, the freedom led to more discrimination, thus less freedom is needed to stop it? It doesn’t make sense.

Jews have not achieved their freedom because of laws forbidding discrimination. In most cases, especially in the Europe, those laws have only come about after Jews have achieved a sufficient degree of freedom to lobby for and pass those laws. Throughout history, the trend has been the exact opposite: it is a history of antisemites using their clout and influence to undermine the freedoms of Jews (not to mention others who don’t agree) to disastrous results.

The solution for the plight of the Jews in Europe was not protectionism by a benevolent paternalist, it was freedom from it. The formation of the State of Israel, for example, gave Jews a country where their economic and political freedoms were not constrained, resulting in great prosperity for that nation. (Sadly enough, the ethnonationalism of Israel has contributed greatly to restricting the freedom of another people…once again, at the hands of state power.)

The fact is that freedom is not provided for by power. In those cases where freedom is greatest–free speech and free religion in the United States comes to mind–the government is constitutionally restricted from infringing on those freedoms. These freedoms are presented in our constitution as negative rights, not a positive ones: we don’t have a right to free speech, Congress specifically has no power to infringe on our free speech. It is for this reason we say are a nation of enumerated powers, for the purpose that our government only has those powers specifically provided for by the people, and no more.

Beauchamp concludes by saying that he’s “not sure more doctrinaire libertarian accounts than his are well-suited to thinking this sort of problem.” The doctrine of libertarianism specifically provides for a historical account of freedom as an increased reduction of the role of the state in economic and social affairs. The largest violation of freedom in the United States–institutionalized slavery–only could exist with the endorsement of state power, not in spite of it. The segregation of the Jim Crow era was a state institution, whose compliant private enterprises operated in a state of recurring fear of police power and intimidation. But suffice it to say that libertarianism has an extremely long discourse on the topic of discrimination and freedom. As it turns out, freedom is better for minorities than government policies. So called anti-discrimination laws cause more harm than good.

The idea that more power will lead to more freedom is almost oxymoronic, and it goes especially so for the Jews, whose very existence is testament to the ability to resist power that has sought so often in history to destroy them.

Saw the news today on Spain’s bailout. The market seems to favor this news. I don’t see how it can. We’re about to see the biggest market correction since the 30’s. And you thought 2008 was bad.

There’s a very simple principle at play here. The more you borrow, the more you owe. If you borrow more to pay back your debts, you will end up owing more. Now that Spain has intermarried its bank debt and government debt, when it borrows $100bn to stay afloat, this isn’t just a bank bailout. The people of Spain wake up today in legitimately more trouble than they were in yesterday. Spain has officially entered the part of the Eurozone that’s beholden to the other members. This part–Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal–is growing, and the number of countries with money to bail out the others is shrinking.

At this point, we’re just kicking the can down the road. And one of these days, there isn’t going to be any bailout money left. Germans will put down their foot. And the country needing the bailout this time is going to be a big player like France or Italy. And no one’s going to be able to pay it.

Sound familiar? At this point we’re just waiting for a Lehman Brothers of Europe. That’s all it will take: one country that’s too big to fail, failing. And when that happens, it’s all over. The moral hazard will be broken. The markets will crash. Capital will fly to Switzerland, the US, the Caymans, or Canada (the rats have been fleeing the ship for a long time already). Debt ridden countries will have billions in liabilities with no way to pay them. Populations will be left without jobs, food or security. People will riot. Tyrants will come to power. What little capital is left will be divvied up by cannibals looking for scraps. The ironic twist is that the only country that will be stable and productive enough to weather the storm will be Germany.

So-called democratic socialists of the world beware: there is no such thing as a substitute for a productive society. Anyone can borrow their way into an easy lifestyle. But eventually the bill will come due.

Recently I was having a spirited debate with a friend whom I suspect to be a libertarian sympathizer. His big criticism of libertarianism–a very fair one–was that libertarians tend to value Freedom as an end in itself, not more tangible and perhaps more measurable goals such as social mobility, humanitarianism, or even wealth creation. What good is Freedom if the fruits of that freedom for some are poverty, sickness, or despair? In particular, the criticism here is utilitarian. Like any ideology, libertarianism proposes a social and economic ideal and lets the policy makers work out the kinks. Of course, then one is left with the same problems: addressing poverty, homelessness, trade deficits, human trafficking and Justin Bieber. Regardless of your ideological positioning, your imperative is to find utilitarian solutions to real world problems. If wearing seatbelts lowers the risk of death in accidents, why not require the wearing of seatbelts? If hamburgers increase the risk of heart attack, why not tax burgers? Etc, etc. Says the jaunty liberal, here we are trying to solve problems and you don’t care: all you care about is the principle of Freedom, but not the problems themselves. Says the social conservative, we agree in theory that Freedom is good, as long as gays and Muslims are just slightly less free than everyone else.

So to the question that was posed to me, which I try to answer here, was this: Why do libertarians promote Freedom as an end to itself? I can’t speak for all libertarians, but I can speak for myself. I pursue Freedom as an end goal in itself because: A) Freedom is a philosophically pleasing concept, one which is, and should be, a satisfying end to itself, B) Societies organized around a political and economic system of Freedom happen to be those that are extremely beneficial for the growth and wealth of individuals, families and society, and C) Free(er) societies also score higher and better for the general welfare, particularly for those indicators which I value as a humanitarian: diversity, equality, opportunity, tolerance and peace.

Now, I must digress and first establish that I do not think that free societies exist in reality, although certainly it can be said that some societies are freer than others. Certainly even the freest economies, like Singapore and Hong Kong, exist under less than optimal political regimes, while the high social freedom of the Netherlands is combined with an almost masochistic suppression of economic freedom. And certainly, the United States, as my main interest, has many free aspects, although on the whole our country has become less and less free economically. Although much social progress has been made in the twentieth century, this progress has come at the expense of the Fed, the Income Tax, the New Deal, the Great Society and countless other bloated expansions of state power, from tariffs to occupational licensure, that have marred the promise of economic freedom that has been synonymous with America for two centuries. In fact, one of the great fallacies of the American right is to continue to claim against mounting evidence that America is still the “land of opportunity.” The fact remains that our stratifying social classes, hardening economic regulations and explosion of the rentier class have made this opportunity dwindle for most and swell for a select few. Conservatives do themselves no favors by denying the obvious instead of working harder to right the ship, making government smaller and pursuing sensible economic deregulation instead of inexcusable social regulation. That said, I look forward to a liberal party that is more interested in social deregulation than economic regulation.

Freedom as a Philosophically Pleasing Concept

I am surprised by how often people tend to discount the central tenant of libertarianism: the Freedom is important. It isn’t important like belief in God or being a vegetarian is important. Freedom is important precisely because it is, in human history, probably the most evasive desire for most people. I have been reading Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White People, and aside from a compelling critique of the creation and hardening of American whiteness in the last 200 years, she goes into the history of race and slavery in general, establishing a long history of forced labor that reaches every expanse of the globe for most of the middle ages. Americans today tend to think of slavery as being that particular institution that existed in the Americas for the planting of cotton and cane with slaves imported from Africa. Painter shows us that not only was African slavery the tail end of an epoch, but a relatively minor part of a much larger epoch than anyone realizes, especially for Europe. This slavery–white slavery–in Europe not only has a legacy, but an extremely powerful legacy in the Enlightenment when the fundamental philosophical disruption about freedom concerns the plight of not just enslaved foreigners in Europe but enslaved Europeans themselves. The legacy of slavery in Europe extends well into the 18th century, such that Robinson Crusoe was not only slave trader and owner but was once a slave himself. By the time of the settling of the new world, Painter estimates that before the boom in African slaves in the 18th century, one-half to two-thirds of the white immigrants to America came in chains.

Why is this important? It tells us that slavery still had a resounding effect on America’s founding fathers, not in the way that you would expect (in that they mostly all owned black slaves) but in that it was a part of their recent cultural memory as well. They may have denied humanity to blacks, but they were not immune to fear of their own servitude as well, as many of them, I’m sure, were descendants of white slaves. Hypocrisies aside, this gives us a very interesting insight into the minds of the founding fathers who had not only utilitarian but personal and cultural reasons to see to the fact that they would never be slaves. Today, Freedom is often presented from an original position, whereby we know that as citizens we are generally free to pursue a living, have a family, do and say what we want, and these are all freedoms guaranteed to us by our constitution. But we forget that the constitution was itself a radical leap forward, and even though it gives us an original position of freedom from which we can write our historical narrative as Americans, we should not take it for granted, and realize that Freedom is extremely vulnerable, even in free societies, even today.

Like all things, people don’t realize how important Freedom is until it is taken away. The discourse of Freedom is often presented as whether or not video games can be sold with obscenities, or whether gays can serve in the military, or even whether having a choice between a low paying job and no job is no choice at all. Very little do we expand our historical frame and realize just how fundamentally secure our freedoms actually are, not only in comparison to the last generation, or the last century, but even our own so-called free contemporaries today. In France, for instance, the rights doctrine not only permits, but encourages, the government to ban burqas in the name of freedom. In Switzerland a similar ban has been placed on minarets. In Germany, antisemitism is illegal, and in Austria, David Irving was actually put in jail for daring to promote a historical opinion that was deemed untrue by the authorities (as untrue as that opinion is, it does not justify jail time in a free society). Of course, in America these laws would never work, but we have our own peculiarities, such as an abhorrent anti-drug regime that has imprisoned millions of people for recreational activities, probably the worst violation of freedom of our time. And we can’t forget the 170 prisoners continuing to be held without a trial at Guantanamo.

Freedom is obviously a specious philosophical concept with many definitions. Some will say that it is primarily a social concept, a basic form of organization where each individual is free to pursue his own relationships and activities. Still others will insist that the economic cannot be ignored in pursuit of the social: by what means do we pursue our own interests if not economical? For me, I will adopt the philosophical paradigm of J.S. Mill, interpreted through the lens of Oliver Wendell Holmes: My right to swing my fist ends at the other guy’s nose. Such is an ideal system for social and economic organization. Since the trade is the basic unit of economic organization, the economic corollary, of course, is that my right to trade freely shall not interfere with your right to do so. Trades undertaken by free people must be A) Bi-laterally voluntary and without coercion, B) Informed and not based on fraud. A slave is not free because his labor is coerced and his work is not voluntary. A snake oil salesman is not free because he lies about the effectiveness of his product. In both cases, the buyer and the seller of a commodity must be informed and without coercion. In this way, people do not trade unless each person feels they have something to benefit from the trade. The great thing about free trade in this manner is that both people can benefit; i.e., it is not a zero-sum game. Now, as to how we define informed (a sticking point with liberals) and coercion should not distract us from the general principle. It is interesting to note that the areas where Freedom is most controversial is exactly where the definitions of coercion and fraud factor into the discussion. In abortion, a fundamental question exists of whether the fetus constitutes an agent of choice free from coercion. In healthcare, a fundamental question exists of whether adequate medical knowledge is possible for a layperson. But in general, the principle is sound. If we can agree on the terms coercion and fraud, the general paradigm of Freedom should solve itself.

The fundamental concept that Freedom is that wonderful system whereby people are able to pursue their own ends for their own purposes, without it being at the expense of others, is not only philosophically satisfying but unquestionably good. I don’t see how any interlocutor–ignoring the specific questions above–can say that Freedom is morally repellent from a purely philosophical perspective. I think Americans, whatever their persuasion, recognize this, which is why our cultural memory is shaped most often by those people who fought for more freedom–Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln–and those people who defended freedom–Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan–and those people abroad who fought their own battles for freedom–Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Even our movie icons are freedom lovers, from John Wayne to Braveheart. And of course, Freedom is a strong philosophical tradition in its own right.

Still, it is hard to believe today that despite this cultural and philosophical legacy there are many, from all sides of the political spectrum, who want to deprive citizens of their Freedom. This is why to this end libertarians devote themselves: To defend Freedom, not as a means to any economic or humanitarian end, but as an end itself. Although, as I establish below, there are economic and humanitarian benefits to Freedom that more than justify its preeminent position as a philosophical standard bearer.

Freedom as a Means to Greater Wealth

If Freedom were achieved only for its philosophical ends, it would be enough. But it just so happens that Freedom is a necessary prerequisite of those other elusive human desires: wealth and welfare. We must distinguish between wealth and welfare. Wealth is individual, relative and mobile. Welfare is societal, regresses to the mean, and moves with the lot of society. Now, it just so happens that Freedom is a boon to both. In this section I will talk about wealth, and in the next, welfare.

Wealth is an individual concept. One man’s wealth, speaking strictly economically, is defined by what he is able to purchase and trade, not how his wellbeing is defined in relation to others. Wealth is also a relative concept. Poor Americans are materially richer than most people in the world, and yet still find themselves at the bottom of a tremendous spectrum of wealth. We have abject poverty contrasted with insane amounts of wealth in fictional sounding quantities. Much has been made about the growth of the gap between rich and poor in Western countries in the last half century, but not nearly as much has been proclaimed about the growth of the lot of the poor, especially in those regions of the world only recently freed from the chains of communism and socialism, the eastern bloc European countries and of course India and China. Putting that aside for now, we can see that the discourse is very quick to point to relative wealth instead of absolute wealth.

I just finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. It is a wonderful little book, not so much for its economic content (it has none) but for the narrative it casts over that little scandal in American society we term the working poor. Of course, the existing of the working underclass is no secret but Ehrenreich brings it to light in an honest and provocative way. But its lack of economic content leaves the reader wondering–why are the poor people she writes about so thoroughly disfavored by the system, and what can be done about it? The immediate answer from most liberals is a higher so-called “living” wage, which is academically lazy. Yes, more money would be great (I would like more money too, thank you very much), but the economic question that the book begs, and she fails to answer is not why workers don’t make enough but why is everything so goddamn expensive? An economist would be ashamed to propose a fix to the demand side without the supply side, and Ehrenreich talks at length about the obstacles faced by the working poor–housing and lodging costs, cost of food, medical costs, gas–without once questioning when and why the prices have jumped as they have. Why a pill that can be made for 10 cents costs $10 a pop. Why gas is almost $5/gallon in some places and rising. Why the demand for housing from the urban poor has not been met with adequate supply. And while this book has been met with an immense amount of critical review from proponents of increasing the minimum wage, no one I have found has approached the book as a guide to those truly horrendous treatments our society gives the poor through curtailing the Freedom of society, and that’s the real scandal at play here.

What do I mean? Well, let’s look at a disadvantaged poor 20-something male in an inner city like Chicago. From where have his disadvantages come? First, he has been “educated” in a governmental school: an atrocity where pupils are churned out with no regard to individuality and dumped on society at larger with no skills are training. He has grown up in public housing, where people of lower socioeconomic status are not only segregated from the public, but are segregated in groups that make it more likely for children to grow up around gangs, drugs and violence. He has a criminal record due to the possession of marijuana, because of puritanical drug laws that increase criminality rates with no discernible effect on drug use. Occupational licensure has restricted his access to stable middle class employment. He has been unable to acquire on-the-job training from a young age–the most important path out of poverty–because minimum wage and child employment laws have prevented him from getting a job at a relatively low wage and younger age to acquire skills he would need to get a higher wage later on in life. Finally, to add insult to injury, he is enrolled in a government welfare scheme that controls where he can live, what size family he can have, what jobs he can take and how many substances he can ingest.

When he works, he has to pay a portion of his income toward a required annuity at sub-market rates that he may never live to receive (Social Security). His cost of living is significantly increased by a host of regulations: commodities like clothes and tools face tariffs coming in from China, raising their cost. Anti-big box store legislation has made it more expensive to get necessities of life from places like Walmart (which isn’t even allowed in Chicago). The cost of gas has gone up because our government restricts drilling and piping making us vulnerable to foreign markets. The cost of medical care and drugs has skyrocketed thanks to regulations running the gamut from medical licensure (restricting entry into the profession) to FDA rules (preventing the importing of lower cost drugs or drugs that aren’t available on the market in the US) and regulation of the insurance markets. And then, the rent situation: virtually anywhere he can live is steeped in housing regulations, from rent control policies which raise rents to building codes which require over-engineering, to hotel codes which raise the cost of bookings.

And this is all before taxes and inflation.

Now, whether or not one agrees with these regulations or believes them necessary (I will be happy to take up any one of these points for further inspection), it cannot be denied that these disadvantages are not inborn but a result of a system of governmental controls that prevent economic mobility and keep poor people poor. The problem of poverty in wealthy countries has nothing to do with wealth distribution and everything to do with wealth suppression; i.e. active government policies which suppress the accumulation of wealth for those who need it most. It just so happens that a philosophy of Freedom also applies to economic freedom and ridding society of these pesky regulations–there is no conflict and most importantly, we have historical evidence that the pursuance of these policies are not only infringements on Freedom but destructive to wealth in general.

Throughout history, societies with larger private sectors and greater economic freedom have contributed to greater wealth for the society on the whole. Can there be any doubt that the bloated public sector of India until the liberalization of the economy in the 1980’s led to poverty, widespread depression and lower wellbeing? Can there be doubt that the redistributionist policies of Mao led to widespread famine and poverty in China until the private sector was unleashed in the 70’s? Finally, what is to be said for the paragon of socialism today, the relatively wealthy countries of northern Europe? Even with a large public sector, certainly, the standard of living has dramatically increased in Europe in the last 50 years. But I venture to say that such economic gains have been made with short term investments with no regard for long term consequences. The current financial crisis will cripple Europe for a generation, precisely because far too much borrowing and expansion of the public sector at the expense of future generations was undertaken. Of course, countries like Sweden are doing very well since they have liberalized in the last 20 years, whereas countries like Greece that have not are stagnant.

So although the US as well as Europe and many other free market societies continue to fail in alleviating poverty, the biggest scandal is that instead of trying to fix the problem by liberalizing, we turn to solutions that have not only been demonstrated ineffective but cause more poverty.

Freedom as a Means to Greater Welfare

Of all the desirable effects of Freedom on a society, perhaps none is as easily attainable–and yet still so widely out of reach–as general welfare. In unfree societies, many people can become wealthy and thrive. I attended a very elite university with many of the offspring of these wealthy individuals from unfree societies, individuals who, for the most part, attained their wealth and status by extorting their people’s labor or nationalizing their country’s natural resources. Robert Mugabe is known for his lavishly expensive birthday celebrations. The King of Swaziland has a reported $100M fortune. Certainly tyrants and their cronies know how to enrich themselves at the expense of their people. What you don’t have in these societies, on the other hand, are thriving economies of ordinary, non-endowed people who likewise are able to acquire wealth for themselves and families. Societies where a middle class exists and betters itself. Societies where the general welfare is on the whole greater through cooperation and non-coercion. So one must distinguish between wealth and welfare, insofar as wealth is a yacht, and welfare is a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Now the phrase itself, “general welfare,” is perhaps misleading because it connotes wealth more than less intangible indicators like happiness, health, human development, safety and security, and peace. General welfare is about eliminating the restrictions on a society’s opportunity to grow, flourish and succeed based on the merit of individuals–restrictions that have almost exclusively happened at the hands of state power. Thus the third pillar of Freedom is to support the pursuance of Freedom in the name of welfare, or, as I like to approach the problem, humanitarianism. The indicators of humanitarianism grow in free societies not out of control but out of voluntary cooperation. People are happier in mutual partnerships with other people provided that a framework exists to foster free trade, free discourse and free religion. It is the societies that depart from these fundamental values that find themselves at the short end of the Freedom spectrum.

It is beyond debate that the societies that embrace values consistent with freedom–free trade, free speech, freedom of conscience, and freedom of person (subjected to imprisonment only under the due process of law)–are demonstrably better societies, even if we are talking in just degrees. There is no question that the quality of life in liberalized France is better than the quality of life in post-communist socialist Slovakia. There is no question that people are healthier in Singapore than in neighboring Malaysia. And most importantly, we have three amazing accidents of history in which countries once united factored along lines of economic organization and showed us just how important Freedom is to the welfare of a society: the Two Koreas, the Two Chinas and the Two Germanys; all showing us that the society with freer trade had freer people, and freer people were not only more productive but happier, healthier and materially richer. Now of course, as Milton Friedman so often said, free trade is not a sufficient condition for freedom, but it is a necessary condition. Free trade is philosophically consistent with the basic purpose of Freedom, which is to allow the individual control over her own life and property.

What’s more, the humanitarian values of free societies are consistent with the core philosophies of Freedom: mutual respect for another’s individuality. Diversity. Self-reliance and self-responsibility. Helping others through voluntary altruism instead of forced wealth distribution (it isn’t charity if you’re doing it with other people’s money). The very historical heroes of humanitarianism are those people who advocated freedom in the face of government oppression: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, whereas many heroes of socialism insult the values that humanitarianism represents: Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, and Fidel Castro. This is without mentioning those socialists who actually came to power in a real way, and in doing so destroyed tens of millions of lives: Joseph Stalin (30-60 million), Mao Zedong (40-70 million), and Pol Pot (a paltry 2 million), to name a few. Socialism has such a bloody and painful history, it is a wonder that any serious disciple of philosophy or history advocates socialism at all with any qualification, “democratic,” “libertarian” or otherwise.

Socialists thrive in free societies where their voices are unburdened and they find willing listeners among a population that has lost its perspective on what freedom actually means. When so much material wealth exists around us, one often hears phrases like “a country that is as wealthy as the United States should take care of its citizens with ‘free’ healthcare, ‘free’ tuition, and more.” This turn of phrase does not take into account that the reason the United States is as wealthy as it is is because it largely did not “take care of its citizens,” i.e. it did not abuse the levers of state power to distribute wealth or take on the mantle of paternalism (while, I might add, the now-collapsing European socialisms did just that). The United States is a great historical example of the benefits of Freedom. Of course, it is not a perfect model. The framework of a constitution written by slaveholders who claimed all men are created equal–as long as they were white and male and owned land–is of course fundamentally flawed, and this directly violates the liberty, at the hands of government, of everyone who doesn’t fit this narrow criteria. And this goes way beyond access to resources. This is about human liberty and the dehumanization of blacks, women and Indians from the national project. Thus our constitution from its very onset was, to a degree, anti-freedom, even though it was arguably more pro-freedom than any framework set up before it. But we can’t change the past, only look to the future, and we want to improve liberty, we need to look to the problems of today and fix them. Certainly, today, there are major problems; if we had made it to the ideal of liberty (that libertarians seek), then we wouldn’t be constantly frustrated about how much the government does to destroy Freedom. So I do not pretend to claim that we have reached the pinnacle of human freedom, or any time in the past was necessarily better for freedom than today. Of course, in some ways it was and in other ways it wasn’t. But even a casual observer of history has to recognize the path of progress, and how we’ve slowly gained freedom, for the most part, as a nation, even if we haven’t reached that ideal yet.

There is a final point to be made about peace. Another elusive political and humanitarian goal, peace is so often on the standards of leftists who simultaneously promote policies that undercut Freedom in its basic sense, and rightists who promote peace with the imperialist sword. The hallmark of peace is a society without war. So a fairer question is, not “what can we do to achieve peace” but “what can we do to avoid war,” a question which receives too few answers from the pacifist left and the war-mongering right. I would certainly side with the leftists in that going to war seems hardly the best way to avoid war. But I would side with the rightists in that fostering cooperation and trade between nations is the best way to not only avoid war, but to make people in both countries personally invested in a state of peace. Free trade, like all aspects of Freedom, is about lowering the barriers to competition, letting people mutually cooperate across boundaries of ethnicity, race and class, and more importantly leave nationalism at the door. When people shop at Walmart, they are shopping for products that were produced by fishermen in Peru and loggers in China. They are using shopping carts made of metals mined in Angola with wheels made of rubber harvested in Brazil. The very experience that so many Americans live every day has been shaped by millions of nameless people, all cooperating despite the fact that their mutual religions, races, languages and philosophies may be at odds with each other. A world at peace is a world where people grow from mutual cooperation, not destroy each other with competition, trade or otherwise (it is one of the main points in support of free trade–the intractability of trade wars).

There are many other points that could be made here: how Freedom is a proxy for opportunity, how Freedom is favorable to education and learning, how Freedom creates communities that are dependent on each other out of choice and support instead of malice and desperation. There are so many good points to be made, but for the sake of brevity (I jest) I have given a basic outline of Freedom as a means to general welfare. But in short, a proper libertarian reading of history views humanitarian injustices as infringements on human freedom. Our goal is to expand human freedom which requires recognizing the source of past problems (namely, the government being established on the basis of, and then for a long time–and still today–restricting human Freedom), and correcting those problems by pursuing good changes like the Nineteenth Amendment which move the cause of liberty forward, and opposing bad changes like the Eighteenth Amendment which move it backwards.

In Which I Concede Some Ground to the Utilitarians

Above I have tried to answer why Freedom is the goal that libertarians seek, for its undeniable philosophical ends, for its economic ends, and its humanitarian ends. If he has read this entire essay, a utilitarian will immediately jump on the fact that I have not responded to his concerns that sometimes a government can promote Freedom and sometimes a government can promote wealth and sometimes even a government can promote humanitarianism. I will concede this point to the utilitarians: that nothing is perfect; that Freedom is not a perfectly attainable goal given the current political climate, that no true lover of Freedom would be interested in pursuing violent means to achieve the ends of Freedom listed above. Thus, Freedom lovers must embrace the enemy, so to speak, and work within the bounds of a structure, highly entrenched society like the United States in order to arrive at the conditions conducive to maximum Freedom piecemeal. It means that lovers of Freedom, however reluctantly, must support some legislation to see their work accomplished.

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 is an excellent example of Freedom coming to opposition with government power, without resulting in evil for society. There is no question that segregation (itself a result of racist, anti-humanitarian and unfree government legislation) needed to end. And there is no question that the only thing more powerful than the state of Mississippi in 1965 was the federal government. We must applaud the political tact of Lyndon B. Johnson in his ability to maneuver a vote on the Civil Rights Act which at least created a reprieve in bad government regulation for an oppressed population. But lovers of Freedom must also question those parts of the Civil Rights Act that might have done more harm than good in the long run. Regulations that set the precedent of establishing how a private citizen may spend his money are dangerous to the economic welfare of society. Regulations that forcibly integrate schools are nominally no different than regulations that forcibly segregate schools. We benefit from those regulations that support our concept of equality and fairness, but we lose when those regulations create an environment rife for abuse and tyranny. With schools, especially, we have an atrocious system of education that penalizes the poor, lowers the quality of schooling, and often ends up ironically being more segregated than meeting the public educator’s vision of diversity in education. But libertarians would not gain credibility or political capital by outright opposing long-held tenants of American progress such as Public Schooling and the Civil Rights Act. We must be pragmatic in our pursuit of Freedom, even if it means sometimes sacrificing principle in the name of progress, as many progressives and socialists have done in the United States in the past. With schooling, for instance, support of a voucher program is much more likely to gain support than support of outright privatization.

There is also the question of the utilitarian harm of radical economic change. For instance, no libertarian worth his salt supports the minimum wage law, but we must not pursue the abolition of the minimum wage before we have pursued other low hanging fruits with a better positive utility for all Americans instead of a negative utility for the poor. There is no question that if the minimum wage were abolished tomorrow, before the economic benefits of eliminating other burdensome government regulations listed above, the poor would suffer disproportionately more from lower wages and no change in the cost of living. This would not be progress. But we also should not shy away from pushing for progress on all fronts: the minimum wage law could be opposed on a federal level without harming its impact on a state level (where it is often higher). Another example is healthcare regulation: most libertarians oppose occupational licensure, but there are benefits to keeping licensure of physicians in place while we push for more structural changes to free up the healthcare market and liberalize hospitals, medical practices and insurance companies.

So the utilitarians are right in their general criticisms toward libertarians, in that we are mainly an ideology of principle. Let us use our common ground to blur our differences, however. Libertarians still have a duty and an obligation to be a voice of reason against the radical calls of the socialists on the left and the neo- and social conservatives on the right, with utilitarians often apologists for both, and consistent with Freedom, we should make our case in the marketplace of ideas and not force others to believe as we do against their will. A devotion to Freedom should not, as a friend of mine has suggested, reach a level of religiosity whereby we forget ourselves and real utilitarian concerns, but nonetheless libertarians should remain devoted to principle and should always do more to spread the gospel of Freedom to anyone who would hear it.

Conclusion

Unfortunately in this essay I have not done much to define Freedom or ease the concerns of non-libertarians that our definition of Freedom might ignore the very real perils of freedom for people living in free societies: for example, a low wage worker who must choose between working for a corporation that abuses him or starving is not really free by any reasonable definition. There is an ethical approach to this problem, and to the question of Freedom, that I would like to cover in another essay. The rough outline of the argument is defining Freedom as a societal problem, not an individual problem, and those solutions which might improve the freedom of the individual often do the opposite to society, and in many cases, the cure is worse than the disease for all parties involved, and still yet in many cases the disease itself is a result of the worker not even living in a truly free society. But as that essay is an ethical one and this one is a political one, I will leave those points elsewhere.

Hopefully what I have done in this essay is touched on the main concerns of libertarianism as it comes to pursuing Freedom, and make it clear why it is that libertarians pursue Freedom for its own ends, as a means to greater wealth and a greater welfare. With the goals of Freedom in mind, libertarianism is not only a means to an end, but an ideology committed to those human values which have plagued us from the dawn of civilization. It may be difficult to convince others, but that does not mean we should shy away from the fight.

I recently met up with an old friend in Budapest and as we were walking near the city center, he asked me, quite randomly, “have you seen the Michael Jackson shrine?” I was intrigued, and it just so happened that it was less than a block away, so we went there, and sure enough, we found a Michael Jackson shrine. In Budapest. See, it’s right there on the right.

Now, first I have to describe this shrine, because it’s no ordinary shrine. It’s at the corner of a delightful little tér across the street from what I later find out is a hotel. And of course, this is not a shrine at all, it’s a tree, an ordinary tree about a hug’s wide, with an assortment of Michael Jackson’s pictures, tributes, handwritten notes and poetry affixed to the trunk, and candles and flowers placed by the base.

Of course, when one finds a Michael Jackson shrine in Budapest, it’s hard not to ask some fairly basic questions. What’s up with Michael Jackson in Hungary? Why is there a shrine to him. Why is there a shrine to him here? And why is the shrine to him seemingly spontaneous, and off of pretty much every single map and not found in any book. In fact, it took me quite a bit of hunting in Google to find out what the deal is here.

You see, the building I later found out was a hotel is the Kempinski Hotel Corvinus, which has an interesting tidbit about this tree on their Facebook page.

Hundreds of celebrities stayed at the Kempinski Hotel Corvinus Budapest in the past 19 years.

Among them the late Michael Jackson. The hotel hosted the king of pop three times, in the same presidential suite each time. In 1994, on his first visit, he was shooting a short feature on Heroes’ Square. In 1996, he visited twice: after a brief stay to examine the premises of his upcoming concert here, he gave a spectacular performance in the People’s Stadium on September 11. That was the second stop of his History World Tour, in Budapest.

Mr. Jackson appreciated being loved. He would often stand by his window, looking out, waiving at and sending messages to his fans. They camped outside the Kempinski Corvinus day and night, chanting his name.

Following his death, his fans named the tree, where they spent so much time trying to catch a glimpse of their idol, Michael Jackson Memorial Tree.

Ah! So there we have it. A sweet story about this little shrine. Apparently Michael Jackson is huge in Hungary, with a yearly flash mob dedicated just to him.

But in the 3 hours between discovering the tree and looking up more about it, I was very intrigued about the possibilities here. I imagined perhaps, in the 80’s when Jackson was getting huge, that his music and stage presence and celebrity were well known in Hungary, still under oppression behind the Iron Curtain. I imagined that people must have listened and watched Michael Jackson in secret, blown away by his artistry and command of dance, watching the crowds cheering him on in distant lands with technologies and civilization that people in Hungary must have found a wonder to behold. I imagined that Michael Jackson, someone who expressed freedom and happiness in his music, resonated deeply in the Hungarian spirit, in the spirit of a people who themselves tried to throw off the shackles of communism in 1956 only to have their rebellion ruthlessly crushed. I imagined that in the 90’s, when people were free, and Michael Jackson came to Hungary for the first time, people waited on line for days to get a chance to see a glimpse of their idol. People idled for hours outside his hotel waiting for him to come out. People paid money they didn’t have to go to his concerts. And of course, I imagined how sad the people of Budapest were for their idol when he died, and how someone maybe saw a tree in his favorite park and put his Michael Jackson portrait there as a tribute. And more and more people joined in, expressing their love for this legend who made them dream of freedom in darker days.

It was a nice thought…and the truth was less cathartic. But I think maybe even a little of what I thought might have been true, and that gave me hope.